City roots: Visionary's love of landscape design began in New Bedford

Joni Mitchell sang about paving paradise to put up a parking lot. But what if you unpaved the parking lot to plant paradise?

Lauren Daley

Joni Mitchell sang about paving paradise to put up a parking lot.

But what if you unpaved the parking lot to plant paradise?

That's what urban landscape architect and New Bedford native Chris Reed is doing right now in downtown New Bedford by turning the parking lot near Custom House Square into a city green.

Making green areas a part of working city life, where working people can eat lunch outdoors and socialize and school kids can play, is Reed's basic philosophy for building cities the world over.

"Landscape design organizes cities. The scope and reach of landscape — culturally, socio-economically and environmentally— in an urban setting is what interests me," said Reed, an adjunct associate professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the founding principal of Stoss.

Stoss, a Boston-based, collaborative design and planning studio, "works at the intersection of landscape architecture, urban design, and planning in an emerging field known as landscape urbanism," according to the company's website.

"Good urbanism and landscape architecture do as much for the environment as people who advocate for open spaces," Reed said. "It's great to have open space, but you also need good jobs. That's something that's stayed with me from growing in up New Bedford."

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Reed, a 44-year-old New Bedford native, now lives in Brookline with his wife and three kids. But his love of landscape design dates back to his Whaling City roots.

He was born in 1969 to William and Martha Reed, and grew up with his three siblings—Andrew, Amy, and Timothy—on Rotch Street in downtown New Bedford. He attended Betsy B. Winslow Elementary School, Keith Junior High and New Bedford High School, graduating in 1987.

"My interest in design and planning started to grow when I was growing up in New Bedford," Reed said.

"The care and attention that was paid to the historic downtown area, how preservation was used as a tool for renewal, I thought that was interesting," he said. "I don't think I realized just how passionate I was about that until I got to college and realized you could actually study that."

Reed graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in urban studies in 1991. He earned his Master's degree in landscape from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995.

After working for six years at Hargreaves Associates in Cambridge, designing college and university campuses, among other things, he left to found Stoss in 2000 to follow his own agenda, he said.

That agenda was to design cities "based on how landscape shapes cities, and the mutability of landscape — not just how trees grow, but how rivers may move over centuries," he said.

"For example, we have a project in Milwaukee that allows for river flooding. So on one hand, you're giving the river the space it once had, and two, you're reminding people of the presence and power of natural resources."

Many of his projects are long-term in vision — one landscape project in Detroit, based on the reshaping of empty spaces near the city's waterfront, is a 50-year plan.

Reed has participated in competitions and designed projects all over the U.S. and in Canada, Europe, Israel, the Middle East, Taiwan, and China. Among dozens of awards, Stoss and Reed have won the 2012 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Landscape Architecture, the Progressive Architecture Award, the Topos International Landscape Award, Top Honor Award for Waterfront Design by the Waterfront Center, along with others.

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As for the New Bedford project, Reed said Custom House Square is "a site I remember from my youth"ģI remember thinking, 'Wow, if you took that parking garage down, it could be a beautiful center of the historic district."

The parking lot was built in 1998 after the demolition of the Kerwin Garage.

Reed said New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, a college classmate, called him up earlier this year to ask him to design a park for the downtown area. Reed is doing the project at no charge to the city.

Reed plans for the park to be a "lush and green outdoor living room for the city; a spot for people to relax, for workers to have lunch, and a spot to use for community events." One section of the area will be left open enough to erect an event tent.

"It's not about designing a landscape available to only certain classes of people, or only for leisure purposes," Reed said. "It's about: how do you affect people on their way to their job? How do you set up conditions conducive to a range of occupations? How do you make the nitty-gritty of the city work? These days, landscape architects can lead the way in the reimagining and remaking of cities."

Lauren Daley is a freelance writer. Contact her at ldaley33@gmail.com.

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